Monday, August 03, 2015

Sitges

And here I am back from Sitges. As per my promise last week (Fighting to the End), today I publish the pawn ending, such as it is, that I had at the tournament. I’m not sure I have to tell many readers of this blog how the game ended.

Anyhoo, while I enjoyed my time in Spain immensely, the chess cannot exactly be called an unqualified success. Indeed on the very day that you were reading these words in my post on Walter Browne …

I do not expect to be amongst the leaders by this point.

I was playing on the very bottom board of the tournament.

You may recall that I also spent some of that post musing on the differences between the good chessers and the people like me. Well some of the things that separate us are not too difficult to work out. The good - or even the moderately competent - ones amongst us don’t take a trivially won double rook ending a pawn up, miss a simple chance to win a second pawn and end up in the king and pawn endgame that you see above, for instance. The good - or even the moderately competent - ones don’t take a trivially won double rook ending two pawns up and manage to lose it either. Unlike me in round 5.

At least I lasted long enough to be incompetent in those games. In round one I lost by default when my phone went off after about an hour’s play. Ironic really. In England my phone’s on all the time, but I’d had the thing switched off for the two days I’d spent in Spain up until that point. Actually I still can’t remember turning it on or why I might have done so. Obviously I must have done, though. While my position was already pretty filthy by the time my phone rang it would have been nice to have been outplayed for a bit longer rather than having to head straight for a seafront cafe.

Ah well. I enjoyed playing in such a diverse field - my opponents were a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dane, a German, another Norwegian, a French lad, an Indian, a Russian and a Spaniard - and despite all of the mishaps in the first half of the event I still arrived at the last round knowing that a win would give me a 50% score and a good shot and winning a rating prize (u2100 I think). More on that next week. In the meantime, I don’t think I’ve had enough chess just yet so I’ll be off to Golders Green for the rapidplay on Saturday. I hope to see some of you there.